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"For its part, Seagate is saying it cut back its warranties to be more closely aligned with other drive manufacturers."

Right, because differentiating yourself as a premium provider with a better than industry norm warranty wouldn't work. They would rather be "the same" as everyone else. Funny how I always hear car manufacturers claiming their "drive train" warranty is longer than the other guy. I guess that won't work in the drive market though. Not being sarcastic here - I'm sure these folks understand their market better than a random AC, so it must make sense.

"For its part, Seagate is saying it cut back its warranties to be more closely aligned with other drive manufacturers."

Right, because differentiating yourself as a premium provider with a better than industry norm warranty wouldn't work. They would rather be "the same" as everyone else. Funny how I always hear car manufacturers claiming their "drive train" warranty is longer than the other guy. I guess that won't work in the drive market though. Not being sarcastic here - I'm sure these folks understand their market better than a random AC, so it must make sense.

This smells like the sort of move a company makes when it is run by bean-counters, rather than a leader with vision, seizing the high ground and pointing a finger back at spineless competition, while laughing out loud - "See, they are rubbish and we are the best!"

Next: Enter the marketing wizards to put some sort of bombasitic and completely unfathomable positive spin on this - "Really, it's good for the market! Honest!"

In such a brutally commodified market as HDDs, I suspect that all the companies are run by bean counters and the visionaries are dead.

Because they are so cheap, per GB, mechanical HDDs aren't going anywhere for a decent chunk of the future; but they've been boxed in such that there isn't any noticeable room for 'visonary' development:

1. Performance? If you want that, you'll be talking to a totally different company with a background in semiconductors, either Flash or DRAM, depending on how much money you are made of. Nothing stopping the HDD people from selling rebadges; but rebadging is not exactly a visionary(or terribly high margin) business.

2. Reliability? Because servicing a warranty request isn't inexpensive(phone drones, fedex, etc.) anybody who can't deliver drives with a low failure rate during standard PC OEM warranty periods is going to find their sales limited; but reliability at the drive level isn't actually worth very much: The value of the world's spinny disks is peanuts compared to the value of the data on them. Most of the reliability money and R&D is going into RAID, advanced filesystems, various automated redundancy and backup solutions, etc. Again, nothing stops the HDD guys from selling rebadge RAID controllers or cloud backup services; but rebadging is not exciting.

3. Features? If it doesn't just drop in and play nice with the SATA/SAS controllers of the world, including the legacy and currently shipping ones, it's a dud. If it has some cool feature that is supported only by your proprietary utility, on controllers that directly pass the necessary nonstandard commands, it isn't going to be wildly useful. If it achieves sufficiently broad adoption that OS and HDD controller support starts coming standard, it is no longer a unique competitive advantage...

Cynically, there is also the fact that even people buying on the basis of desire for mechanical reliability don't have access to very good information: hardware and firmware revs change constantly, sometimes with a change in model designation, often not, some designs turn out to be workhorses, some are deathstars, some batches are bad, some aren't. Everybody has an emotional position on reliability, based largely on which brands failed them in the recent past; but unless they are buying in serious volume and somewhat behind the tech curve, data about the past are largely obsolete.

I guess I have to agree. At this point, if I build a desktop, it's raid1 to start with. The price of drives are so cheap, I start by assuming I'm getting what I'm paying for and buy two of them and then mirror.

As for servers, as the size of drives has gone up, my interest in parity based raid solutions has proportionally gone down. Lots of drives in a raid10, either smart raid controllers or ZFS make my interest in a single drive basically nil.

4. Size and Price. Most people frankly aren't gonna give a second thought to anything but size and price, you can trumpet your warranty to the high heavens but if the other guys offers a 2Tb for $50 even if it has a 30% failure rate after 1 years the average users are gonna run right over you to get to the cheap fatty.

You are right though that in a commodity market frankly nobody really gives a shit. all the OEMs care about is the majority survive past the OEM warranty and honestly with the exception of the occasional bad batches most drives easily make 5 years whereas most folks are upgrading or replacing after 3 so again warranty doesn't really matter.

I tell my customers to either have me get or pick up on their own a USB drive and backup often, and data they consider "must never lose" like family pictures have backed up in multiple locations including the cloud. I personally keep a 1Tb USB for OS images and keep my pics backed up there and in the cloud, the rest? meh its replaceable. All my games come from steam or GOG so no problems there, my tunes are on multiple drives AND DVDs, so frankly if a drive died tomorrow it really wouldn't affect me.

I can see though why they've stopped having long warranties, i mean what was the size 5 years ago? something like 160gb? How many of the OEMs want to keep a pallet of those things in a warehouse for replacements? And dealing with customers i can tell you its NEVER the drive they care about, its all the data that went tits up that they aren't getting back and nothing the drive manufacturers are gonna do is gonna change that.

So I don't really see a problem here. I again haven't seen any other than the occasional bad batch (like the current Seagate 1Tb Plus 7200RPMs which are shit) that won't make 5 years and most will be looking at a new machine or new drive before that. Once they get the flood mess cleaned up we'll be seeing $35 1Tb drives and $65 2Tb drives again and frankly nobody will give a shit about warranty again.

I can see though why they've stopped having long warranties, i mean what was the size 5 years ago? something like 160gb? How many of the OEMs want to keep a pallet of those things in a warehouse for replacements?

For older drives, it's common practice for a warranty replacement to be a newer model than the broken one. I have a lot of drives with 5-year warranties and have gotten larger drives about half the time I sent in an RMA, and pretty much always got the latest equivalent in other specs, so cache might be higher, power use lower, etc.

Also, every drive manufacturer is still selling new 160GB drives. No, I don't understand it, either, but it shouldn't be a stock problem for the manufacturer to replace even a five year old drive.

Yes, but the last company to slash their drives from 3 years, to 1 year warranty was Maxtor about 6 or 7 years ago, and they did so at the same time that I had 6 Maxtor drives fail personally in a 3 month period and all of different models, and I haven't bought a Crapstor drive ever since.

In contrast the 5 year warranty Seagates and Western Digitals have always done be well, I know it's just an anecdote but I firmly believe a warranty most definitely is an indication of the quality of a company's product, and if a company is dropping warranty from 5 years to 1 year it implies they no longer have faith in the majority of their products being realistically able to last 5 years.

This smells like the sort of move a company makes when it is run by bean-counters...

Just so you know, warranty decisions are always made by "bean counters" (accountants) and actuaries. Doesn't matter what company it is, they're the ones that have to assess the impact it would have on the company, and what the company can reasonably take on. Engineers and similar would at most provide information to help them make that decision.

This smells like the sort of move a company makes when it is run by bean-counters...

Just so you know, warranty decisions are always made by "bean counters" (accountants) and actuaries. Doesn't matter what company it is, they're the ones that have to assess the impact it would have on the company, and what the company can reasonably take on. Engineers and similar would at most provide information to help them make that decision.

As a Certified Management Accountant once told me - Accountants are there to advise, not run a company. The decision to go with the accountant's advice is, as stated above, a decision to not stand out as a company under the banner of "Quality"

Raid10 is in my future. When the drive prices return to "normal" that is.

Just so you know, warranty decisions are always made by "bean counters" (accountants) and actuaries.
Correct. A warranty is basically an insurance policy that they throw in included in the price of the product. By reducing the warranty period, they are saying that their company feels that they are unwilling to bear the risk of making sure a product lasts five years. And since they are not willing to bear that risk, neither am I.

Oh god... fuck Maxtor.But yes, when our local utilities raise rates, it's to be more "competitive" and "in line" with other regions.So instead of keeping the best warranty in the industry, Seagate is content to fall in line. Whatever, I don't truck with them anymore.

Well, you can read it as Seagate being content to fall in line. It could also be that consumers are not willing to pay the extra few bucks for a 5 year warrantied drive. If they were, then Seagate wouldn't have reason to cut it.

Or, it means that with the extra money they make on the drive (since it cost you more), they expect to be able to at least break even on warranty costs.

For example, take 2 otherwise identical appearing drives - one costs $100 with a 3 year warranty, the other costs $120 with a 5 year warranty.

Does the $120 necessarily mean that it's more likely to make it to 5 years before failing? Not at all - the two drives could be exactly the same. It just means that with the $20 they expect to be able to cover the extra warranty costs on those 5 year warranty drives on average.

Does the $120 necessarily mean that it's more likely to make it to 5 years before failing?

That's a bit of a haughty Socratic tone to explain basic cost/benefit bereft of leverage. As soon as you add volatility to production quality, the warranty liability creates a huge incentive to shift the dubious batch into USB drive appliances at Walmart or Costco.

Without the warranty liability, there's little incentive for the drive manufacturer to bother with the complex logistics of sorting the better grades into the usage patterns less tolerant of failure.

And you're also forgetting how good Detroit became at building cars able to last until the day the warranty expired with hardly any buffer. I know someone who did electronics design work at a major auto components company in the Great Lakes area and was given a stiff rebuke for choosing a part that cost pennies more (our of several dollars) with double the life expectancy. If the cheaper component is already rated to the warranty period, not one penny more. It turns out this is stupid economics. Eventually the consuming public figures it out. Many fat executive bonuses were paid before America nationalized the auto industry.

Here's what enlightenment looks like: In recent design iterations, Intel has a rule that if a feature increases the power budget by 1%, it has to increase performance by 2%.

I think the shorter warranties are a vote by the Seagate executive team to have a business model more like Detroit, and to collect as many performance bonuses as possible, before exiting their careers as the disk industry declines to Kodak levels of relevance.

In iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, exp(caveat_emptor) as the number of iterations remaining declines.

And it'll be a cold day in hell before I trust anything more important to my fetish porn collection to a WD drive...

Why is that? Of all the drive problems I've ever had, from failures to DOAs to Linux incompatibility issues, the one manufacturer that has stood out as being the most reliable is in fact Western Digital. Why do you distrust WD?

Not quite that simple. For the first 2 years of HDD life, that is only true above 45C. Below that, there was a correlation of failure with cooler temperatures, with the most reliable temperature being 45C! Above this, there was a rapid rise in the failure rate, though at the maximum temperature of 50C, the failure rate was similar to 25-30C. With older (3-4 yr old) drives, temperature than became a factor. The report itself concluded:

In the lower and middle temperature ranges, higher temperatures are not associated with higher failure rates. This is a fairly surprising result, which could indicate that datacenter or server designers have more freedom than previously thought when setting operating temperatures for equipment that contains disk drives. We can conclude that at moderate temperature ranges it is likely that there are other effects which affect failure rates much more strongly than temperatures do.

Yes, but sometimes there are bad batches and the shorter the warranty the more likely it is that you'll lose a disk without getting a replacement. Personally, I had a lot of WD disks going south, turned out to be dirty power AFAICT.

Seagate did have issues with a batch of 1tb disks a few years back. I remember Maxtor having issues with some of their 8.5gb drives years back.

Yep. The Great Google Hard Disk Study revealed that no brand was "more reliable" than any other.

Every single manufacturer had troublesome batches and/or models. No brand was immune to this.

FWIW the single biggest factor they found which correlated to failure was heat. If your drive runs hot then expect trouble.

Wait, where in the Rather Poorly Written Google Hard Disk Study, linked by EdZ a few replies away from this one, does it say that reliability didn't vary with brand? All I see related to that is "Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact," specifically stating that reliability does indeed vary by manufacturer. Given the rather sloppy organization in the paper, however, I wouldn't be surprised if they contradict themselves elsewhere and make the claim that you've cited. Can you show us the quotation that gave you the impression that brand doesn't matter?

Well as a little system builder I can say I've been bit in the ass by several of the bad batches, the Seagate 1Tb, The Maxtor diamondmax 200gb of a few years ago, the worst being the Maxtors they put in the optiplex of 2000, boy that was a POS.

Sadly the best two drive manufacturers are getting out of the biz, and that's Samsung and Hitachi. Hitachi made some damned solid server drives and Samsung drives I've frankly put in places i'd never have the guts to put a Seagate or WD, places like construction sites

Yes, and then you have posters like the previous poster who bash "consumer grade" drives and instead push the more-expensive "enterprise-grade" drives. Now maybe I'm missing something, but my understanding is that one of the big differences between "consumer" and "enterprise" drives is the speed they operate at. You're not going to find a 5400 rpm "green" drive in the high-end space; instead, they're usually 10k or even 15k rpm.

And sometimes its fully justified... Let me explain while I will never purchase another Samsung drive...

A few years back I was still working as an IT consultant and a client in San Francisco, a billion dollar a year organization, purchased 40 new workstations. All came with Samsung hard drives. Within 6 months half of the drives had failed.

The client called their sales manager rather irrate after the 18th or 19th drive had failed. The sales manager assured them that it was bad luck and that they had

The Dell small-form-factor and ultra-small-form-factor chassis are likely responsible for most of your drive deaths.

If you have a user that actually loads the processor, the heat inside those boxes becomes frightful. For most "normal" users, it's probably not an issue, but if the cooling fan starts to spin up loud enough to hear, that's the sign.

As for drive brands, I find that pretty much every manufacturer is equal. Out of about 40 drives that have seen 24/7 use for the last 8 years, I've had about 8 fa

Sandforce2 (1200) failures have nothing to do with MLC-vs-SLC, and everything to do with buggy firmware that can corrupt its config data and crash a few minutes after startup if it gets powered down (or put into sleep mode) "wrongly" with the scratch data in a partially-updated or corrupt state. Everyone was so obsessed with long-term data retention life and rewrite cycles that even WORSE failure modes ended up falling through the cracks and becoming the real problem, instead.

Does it really matter whether the flash on a drive can survive 1000, 10000, or a million rewrite cycles if it keeps corrupting itself and has to be reformatted every few weeks or months due to a firmware bug Sandforce can't/won't fix?

Or, alternatively, people are so desperate to get hard drive supplies at this time that they are willing to pay for both A) higher prices (I'm seeing double or more prices around here for popular ones), and B) shorter warranties. The latter will come in handy later even when prices are back to normal.

"Cut warranty now, while customers are desperate and happy to get anything."

Apparently you will just need to buy the higher-end drive models that continue to offer longer warranties. From the article:

"Standard PC warranties are one year. Even so, WD will continue to maintain five-year warranties on its premium desktop/notebook products, including the WD Caviar Black, WD Scorpio Black and WD VelociRaptor products," a spokesperson wrote in an email reply.

The blacks and velociraptors may or may not be better quality drives (I highly doubt that they are), but you will notice that they are vastly higher PRICED drives - grossly overpriced in fact.. I wouldn't want them even if they were priced the same as the 5400 rpm drives. They run hotter, waste more power, and give a very slight real world benefit to desktops or personal servers.

Why would anyone rely on warranties for data? That's just a roulette wheel with a big house advantage. Backup. Backup. Unless you're running some huge drive farm, in which case you should have a backup / RAID / replacement strategy in place, just pull the drives out after three years and replace them. Use the old ones for cold backup or whatever.

I just replaced three 750 GB drives in my MacPro with a 60 GB SSD (for a swap drive) and a pair of 2 TB WD's. Fortunately I bought them before the flood. For

Why would anyone rely on warranties for data? That's just a roulette wheel with a big house advantage. Backup. Backup.

Warranties aren't for data (they don't even try to reclaim data on broken drives) but for the drives themselves. The problem with shorter warranties is it removes the manufacturer's financial incentive to make a product that won't fall apart after 1 year.

Drives aren't that expensive (even after the flood). If your data is that important to you, buy more drives.Whatever the manufacturer, the drive return rates are about 2-5%. It makes no sense to bet that the drive model you happens to be the 2% return rate, and even so that's a 1 in 50 chance you're taking. Unless a particular model/batch is so crap, it doesn't seem worth it to take extra effort just to search around to see which is more reliable.

RAID is so much for back-up (which I took the "safer" part to imply, but if I am wrong, my mistake). In my experience those who RAID for back-up come out sorely disappointed when something fails. Problems in the controller can mean corrupt data in all attached disks; the failure rates when [re]building data can be large... Depending on the level being used may be more or less useful for back-up, but really it's not back-up. RAID is data virtualization. I know it's trite to say ("...not back-up"), but really it could save your butt to observe it; where your comment is very valid, however (IMHO) is that done right the RAID should boost read and write times (making the extra expensive drives that are slightly faster superfluous).

Also remember to have versioning with whatever back-up system you use (copies of data at different times and dates) so that issues with corruption don't leave you with two copies of useless files. If you really want to use it as a back-up solution, though, at least go to RAID 6. On those systems multiple drives may fail and if set right the others will have data in redundancy and keep on functioning; it still doesn't get around the problem of failure points and hardware faults in hardware common to every drive however: unless you are running servers for the world or building important software with a deadline, or perhaps writing a PhD 24/7, I think that is likely overkill though.

A couple external drives, connected with SATA cables if your machine is current enough to support it (USB otherwise) and some software to duplicate important folders periodically to chronological folders, is good enough, cheap, and simple enough that most folks with average intelligence and access to Google can figure out from tutorials or from forum help.

And of course since my last dealings with RAIDers who couldn't get data back, things might have significantly improved...

honestly the 5 year warranty of some drives greatly affects which drive I buy. I am usually segate fan but if a Samsung has better warranty I will buy that instead. I remember when I found one time the drives form Segate I wanted where only 3 year so I bought WD and Samsung at the time. So if WD and Segate drop there warranty period and other makers keep higher warranty then my cash goes to the bigger warranty. If you don't stand buy your product then I have no reason to either.

honestly the 5 year warranty of some drives greatly affects which drive I buy. I am usually Seagate fan but if a Samsung has better warranty I will buy that instead. I remember when I found one time the drives form Segate I wanted were only 3 year so I bought WD and Samsung at the time. So if WD and Seagate drop their warranty period and other makers keep higher warranty then my cash goes to the bigger warranty. If you don't stand by your product then I have no reason to either.

Jeebus. I think I could actually forgive the misspelling of Seagate (at least you were consistent), but your grammar/homophone abuse kills me: where/were, there/their, buy/by.

I once had a coworker that largely taught himself English from books, newspapers and TV in his home country before moving to the USA. Very smart guy, but made English mistakes like this due to a lack of formal English education (which is difficult to correct as an adult)

This post was quite intelligible despite the grammar/spelling errors, so cut him some slack, you don't know his native language.

honestly the 5 year warranty of some drives greatly affects which drive I buy. I am usually Seagate fan but if a Samsung has better warranty I will buy that instead. I remember when I found one time the drives form Segate I wanted were only 3 year so I bought WD and Samsung at the time. So if WD and Seagate drop their warranty period and other makers keep higher warranty then my cash goes to the bigger warranty. If you don't stand by your product then I have no reason to either.

Jeebus. I think I could actually forgive the misspelling of Seagate (at least you were consistent), but your grammar/homophone abuse kills me: where/were, there/their, buy/by.

I once had a coworker that largely taught himself English from books, newspapers and TV in his home country before moving to the USA. Very smart guy, but made English mistakes like this due to a lack of formal English education (which is difficult to correct as an adult)

This post was quite intelligible despite the grammar/spelling errors, so cut him some slack, you don't know his native language.

Native language is Canadian, I mean English. Never been the best at it either. But this is what happens when I type fast and get back to my job.

I've bought several dozen hard drives personally over the years, starting with scsi, and I work in a computer repair shop where I've replaced hundreds of failing and dead drives over my time, so I've got a pretty good sample size to work with.

Long ago I used to buy quantum and seagate because I didn't have the money for backups and so I needed to rely on quality and warranty. Quantum was one of the best quality going, and seagate ruled the roost with its 5 year warranties.

But as the years passed, lots of HDD manufacturers got bought out. Quantum went with IBM and quality absolutely flushed down the toilet about the time of the "IBM Deskstar/Deathstar debacle. Seagate also got bought out, and their quality went south as expected, but their warranties remained at 5 yr for most models.

I continued to buy seagates, until I got so sick of dealing with failing drives and RMA hassles. I bought my last seagate about 2 years ago. (a pair of them) Two weeks after purchase, one of them suffered one of the loudest catastrophic head crashes I have ever heard - the drive sounded like an operating circular handsaw. (best buy was even surprised by the sound when I returned it) They offered me an immediate new replacement, and I instead got my money and bought a different brand. Now I see they're finally dropping their warranties, probably after an extended period of losing their shirts due to a never-ending flood of RMAs.

So at this point I'm down to looking for quality, and only expecting a 1 or 2 yr warranty. Western Digital used to be crap, but while other brands went down in quality, WD seems to have come up. I'm still seeing a lot of samsung drives failing but they've improved. Haven't seen enough toshibas to really have an opinion on them, but I generally haven't had good experiences, especially with their externals. Right now I'm buying WD greens, they're cheap and fairly reliable. I try to avoid buying drives already in enclosures, because it's been my experience that they put the cheapest thing they can find in them, especially the USB-only enclosures, those are generally junk and slow to boot.

May as well throw in my 2c on enclosures also. You get what you pay for when buying a single drive enclosure. A cheap usb-only case is going to be slow and I would be very surprised if the AC adapter lasts more than 2 yrs. My personal favorite at this time is made by OWC, their Mercury Elite Pro [macsales.com], it's got esata, dual fw800, fw400, and usb. USB speed can get up near 38mb/sec, fw400 and 800 top at theoretical maxes of 39 and 79, and esata I have yet to discover the speed limit on, it maxes the drives I have attached. $80 seems like a lot for an empty case, but it's worth it. Two at home and two at work, here I use them for data recovery because they're also tolerant of failing drives.

If you need more storage, go with a Drobo. One at home and one here at work, I know a dozen people that have them and nobody has any complaints, they work as advertised, are easy for even a newbie to maintain, and so far have proven very safe. Stuff a drobo full of WD greens for cheap, reliable, large storage.

You need to brush up on your disk drive history.Quantum sold its disk drive division to Maxtor which was acquired by Seagate, which is still independent.IBM sold its disk drive division to Hitachi which is in the process of being acquired by WD.

Apple designs have a rather long history(Apple III-present, somewhat intermittently) of running everything right near thermal redline in order to keep it quiet. On the plus side, it is pretty impressive how quiet some of their hardware is, especially given its chassis size(quiet is easy when you can just have a row of low-speed 120mm fans blowing over everything, much harder when you have a maze of teeny little air channels and speed controlled blowers and stuff); but it gets damn toasty in there...

Earlier versions of Spinrite would talk to drives at a level below how DOS would access them. It would sometimes recover data that regular drive access calls wouldn't, by knowing tricks related to how MFM and RLL drives actually stored data.

Nowadays, this cannot work. Drives abstract away access to their low-level internals. This allows them to do things like quietly remap bad sectors in a way the user doesn't even see. The work Spinrite used to do--find questionable sectors, read multiple times to get

Based on how I understand the Wikipedia article, I believe SpinRite is just a stronger version of the CHKDSK "surface scan". It reads each sector a few times (or a lot of times if the sector starts to return uncorrectable errors) and writes it back. This way, the drive's controller gets a fresh look at each sector of the hard drive to determine which sectors are in need of remapping soon.

Spinrite doesn't "repair" a drive in the classical sense. Rather, Spinrite will identify failing sectors, recover the data, then swap out the failed sector for a reserved sector. Data recovery is achieved by trying, trying again and trying yet some more using various strategies. For instance, hit a certain failing sector from various originating points on the drive in hopes that such subtle differences will allow enough unreadable bits to be read that ECC can take over.

1 - Drive was bad. Very loud "clicking" noises w/i first 30 days of owning it.2 - Drive had confidential and proprietary data stored on it for work. No, I didn't set up FileVault. Never trusted it.3 - Taking it to Apple meant I would effectively be discarding the drive in direct violation of data handling standards I was subjected to at the time.4 - I would have been w/o my main workstation for about a week.

Heading down to Fry's on a Wednesday afternoon and buying a $30 toolset that inc

Or maybe they are saying, "we offered a feature that led to higher costs for us but did not see a large increase in sales, and have no confidence that this apparently little-valued feature will convince people to buy our product when our competitors lower their prices due to less warranty overhead."

I was wondering about that, myself - but then I saw some guy up above wanting to fill his RAIDed NAS with 6 times 3TB 7200RPM drives. Now, EU prices are going to be higher than U.S. prices, but at E213 per such a drive, I can see why wanting 5 years of warranty is better than 2 year or even 1 year - especially since the data most likely IS going to be safe within the RAID setup.

It would even make the RMA hassle and haggling over whether or not the drive got too hot (the little indicators inside that will c

I use a drive's warranty period as the time after which I expect it to fail. If your drive comes with a 1-year warranty, then I won't expect it to last more than one year. If your competitor's drive comes with a 5-year warranty, I'll expect to have to replace your drive five times before I replace theirs and I'll take that into account when deciding which to buy.

Don't count on it. My Vertex2/120 got into "3-minutes-to-bluescreen" mode last week. It had the latest firmware. The worst part is that you can't even run ddrescue on it, because whatever it is that ddrescue does causes the drive's firmware to crash instantly. I can read files off of it ~3 minutes at a time, but OCZ/Sandforce can't be bothered to give us a recovery util to let us just rip the raw sectors in a dd-like manner for offline recovery. The official party line is that the drives aren't broken, beca

Pretty much any drive using a Sandforce 1200 controller (and probably all Sandforce controller chips, for that matter) is vulnerable to the "8mb drive" bug, even one made by Intel. I believe Intel either called off their partnership with Sandforce, or put it on hold indefinitely, precisely because they weren't about to blindly put their faith in a black-box controller chip they couldn't try to fix themselves if something went wrong.

The big problem with Sandforce is their insistence on keeping everything abo

The electronics themselves, or the data on them? Big, huge difference. Sandforce2 (1200 series) drives in particular are going through a data holocaust at the moment. The problem isn't the electronics failing, the problem is that Sandforce's braindamaged firmware gets the drive into a state that causes the firmware itself to crash after a few minutes, or causes the drive to go into "panic" mode and intentionally brick itself (taking your data with it) for your "protection" (nobody at OCZ has ever been able to give a good explanation about how, exactly, having your drive brick itself into "panic" mode as a "precautionary" measure so you have to send it in and get a replacement with your data gone forever is somehow a desirable feature).

Don't believe me? Go to ocz.com's support forum, find the one for Vertex2/Agility2 drives, and read the daily tales of woe with no solution besides "wipe the drive and try again" (assuming it's not in Panic Mode & has to be returned for official reflashing). Apparently, other brands using the same controller (Patriot, etc) are no better. Sandforce makes vendors treat their chipset like a black box, they dropped the ball, and just kind of left everyone unfortunate enough to own a drive based on one of their controller chips hanging like a corpse from the gallows of a wild-west town.

If I were suspicious I'd think they're calling up their old stock and selling them as new (3yr warranty in 2009, 1yr in 2011).If I were cynical I'd think they're calling up their refurb stock and selling them as new.If I were reasonable I'd think they probably already don't have enough to sell, much less replace for free.

The failure rate for hard drives has been quite well known for some time now: it is precisely 100% +/- 0.0%.

Truly, it is not a matter of IF a given hard drive will fail, it is a matter of WHEN.

That means that having a mirrored pair as a minimum -- even on a home machine -- is not an optional frill, it is a necessity. Even better, offsite cloud storage offer replication globally of vital data that are irreplaceable.

If warranties are dropping, so is reliability, and that means it is more vital than ever to CYA and have solid redundancies all the way from the data center to the family laptop.

The failure rate for hard drives has been quite well known for some time now: it is precisely 100% +/- 0.0%.

Truly, it is not a matter of IF a given hard drive will fail, it is a matter of WHEN.

That means that having a mirrored pair as a minimum -- even on a home machine -- is not an optional frill, it is a necessity.

Uh, RAID is a very bad idea, unless you need 100% uptime (like on a server with hot swap). Broken drives can introduce data errors into the stream, which are eventually duplicated onto the other drive(s) as well. When the file system breaks due to this or some software bug, the file system on all disks is broken. For home use, the much better option is to use the second drive for frequent backups, ideally automated (so you can't forget to do it). The plus side is that the backup drive can be an external dri

I have a hard drive made in 1991 that still works fine. 1000 megabyte Micropolis SCSI full-height (the size of two stacked CDROM drives). It cost so much back in 1991 that I still can't bear to retire it.:)

HDD manufacturers never realized that they had everyone over a barrel. When the Thailand flooding happened, they figured it was a nice opportunity to try some price collusion (triple prices after a 25% drop in production). They never thought it would go so well, and now they're scrambling to roll out similar changes everywhere else, such as dropping the warranty five-fold. Next they will discontinue all the low-end and low-capacity models to "be more consistent with the consumer electronics and technology industries". After that will be to demand a seat on the security council with veto power. Finally, the world.:D I, for one, welcome our hard drive manufacturing overlords./tinfoil hat.

Remember back oh 12-13 years ago when drive manufactures did this? All drive warranties dropped from 5 years to 1 year. This went on for about a year, then got hit with a massive collusion suit. It drove Fujitsu right out of the market. I get the suspicion that this is the same thing, I do not think this has anything to do with debugging the lines, or anything else.

I really expect the same thing to happen, it smells and feels exactly the same.

They have extremely high fail rates on their "Green" and "Blue" lines of drives. Most "Green" drives are lucky to last 2 years without failing. I personally own 4 of their 2tb "Green" drives, and have had 9 failures and counting (in other words, I have had failures of replacements for replacements...).

Since we're trading anecdotes about hard drives I personally like the Western Digital Caviar Green hard drive line and use them for external storage and had only 2-failures (one-predicted) out of ~12-drives of various sizes throughout a 5-year period or so. None of this should mean anything to anyone because this is all anecdotal evidence and Google's research paper about hard drive failures is what you should be judging failures by not Slashdot posts.

The reason why is very simple. Seagate and Western Digital want to sell you extended warranties. In order to do so, they had to make the original warranty period so short that customers would want to buy the extended warranty.

An excellent point with which I agree, but there is still a problem. If you only warranty a drive for one year, you will see to it that absolutely no engineering or quality control effort is expending to make them LAST for more than one year. This is fully in line with fiduciary responsibility, as well as being common sense.

I have always seen the warranty period as a measure of the confidence the manufacturer has in their quality, which is the ceiling for the confidence *I* have in the manufacturer's quality.

But seriously I have never returned a drive for warranty as once it fails securely erasing the data can be an issue if ti doesn't spin up, now that prices have jumped I might consider it but previously drives were so cheap why bother.

Depends. I got into a vicious cycle with Maxtor, they'd replace a drive under warranty, then THAT drive would fail within warranty, and eventually I had to stop the madness.For a Lacie external drive, I sent it in to replace the controller card, came back with all data intact. That was a $400 unit so "so cheap" is relative.

Simple fact is, these are supposed to be professionals, and I'm sure they see data much more valuable than mine. But yes I also mark which drives I should destroy myself.

But seriously I have never returned a drive for warranty as once it fails securely erasing the data can be an issue if ti doesn't spin up, now that prices have jumped I might consider it but previously drives were so cheap why bother.

You can have drives that are in an "almost failed" state where you can nuke most of the data. Those are the ones I send back. If we have a lot of desktop drives die, and the people in question can confirm there was no important data on them (because they never work with such), we store up the drives and wait until we change the desktop admin passwords again before doing a warranty replacement en masse.

But seriously I have never returned a drive for warranty as once it fails securely erasing the data can be an issue if ti doesn't spin up

Even if it's spinning you can't erase everything because of automatic bad sector re-allocation, unless your drive supports SMART extended Secure Erase. And that's if you trust Secure Erase, and at least Seagate won't even give you a list of their drives that support it.

When I send a failed drive in for repair, they can see my/boot partition - LUKS takes care of everythin